Throwback Thursday: AMA Superbike Championship 30 Years Ago
Larry Lawrence | April 6, 2017
Photo by Larry Lawrence
The 2017 MotoAmerica Superbike season is about to kick off in a couple of weeks in Austin. It promises to be a great season with Honda returning with the Genuine Broaster Chicken Honda to join the fray with Yamaha and Suzuki.
With anticipation, high for the upcoming season, we thought it would be fun to look back in this week’s Throwback at the Superbike series 30 years ago.
The 1987 AMA Superbike campaign was the epic battle between Honda’s Wayne Rainey and Yoshimura Suzuki’s Kevin Schwantz. The memorable rivalry began that season before carrying on to the World Championship Motorcycle Grand Prix stage.
This photo is from the Memphis round in August and shows the top four riders of that year’s championship battling it out on the simmering Memphis Motorsport Park road course. Temperatures were over 100 degrees that weekend. Rainey, on the factory Honda VFR750, is leading Schwantz aboard the Yoshimura Suzuki GSX-R750. Giving chase are Doug Polen and Bubba Shobert.
Schwantz got around Rainey to win that day, but while Schwantz won the war that day, Rainey won the battle by ultimately taking the series championship.
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